Re-reading Linda Hutcheon on Beautiful Losers, Prochain Épisode and Trou de Mémoire

David Leahy historicizes Linda Hutcheon's contributions to contemporary critical studies by examining her critical analysis of Hubert Aquin's Prochain Épisode and Trou de Mémoire and Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers in Narcissistic Narrative. Hutcheon's analysis is that the novels mark radical formal shifts towards the postmodern novel; this approach and its contradictions are consistent with the transition from the Structuralist-Marxist and Freudian-Marxist tendencies of the critical journal Tel Quel to the emphasis upon textual discontinuities. Central to Hutcheon's analysis is the idea that "it is the new role of the reader that is the vehicle of . . . change"; however, unless the reader's personal, social, material conditions and ideological commitments warrant this kind of reading, the sexist and politically ambivalent discourses of Cohen and Aquin are just as likely to leave the reader ideologically confused, politically passive and/or accepting of the literature as temporary fantasy or formalistic play. In Narcissistic Narratives, Hutcheon too readily accepts the three novels' self-referential, revolutionary potential as fact, and in the process fails to take enough account of their and her own historically-bound discourses and contradictions